1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to CAD (Computer Aided Design), and more particularly to a design-check system, design-check method and design-check program that checks the electrical characteristics of CAD layout data for a printed circuit board.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, digitization and increased performance of AV equipment has been advancing, as well as the digitization, speed and high integration of the LSI inside the AV equipment is advancing. Together with this, the radiated noise that is radiated from the circuit boards on which LSI are mounted is becoming a problem, and thus circuit-board design technology for reducing radiated noise is becoming very important.
Also, as AV equipment has become smaller and more compact, the miniaturization of the circuit boards inside the equipment has advanced, and in order to make them even smaller, build-up boards made from new materials that differ from the conventionally used glass-epoxy material is becoming widely used. In boards made from this kind of new material, the radiation characteristics of the radiated noise differs from the characteristics from a conventional board, so it is necessary to change the design standards and design method according to the board material.
In regards to this, a system has been proposed in which a designer (registrant) that can provide information related to board design and countermeasure examples for suppressing radiated noise in a database via the Internet, and a designer (user) that needs information related to suppressing radiated noise can acquire information by searching the database (for example, Japanese patent unexamined publication No. 2002-157280(Pgs. 4 to 7, FIG. 1)).
In the prior art described above, the registrant registers detail circuit design and board layout in the database as design and countermeasure examples, so by searching the database, the user is able to acquire the detail circuit design and board layout. Therefore, by analyzing the acquired circuit design and board layout, the user not only is able to acquire information related to suppressing radiated noise, but is also able to acquire detail information related to circuit design and board layout.
For the registrant, acquisition of detail information related to the circuit design and board layout by the user is not preferable since it is connected to leaking know-how. Furthermore, there is the danger that the circuit design and board layout acquired by the user will be distributed to a third party free of charge.